Early Autumn - Paperback

by Ted Pearson (Author)

In this vibrant collection Ted Pearson casts a deadpan, but entrancing, spell, offering an obliquely generative model for a poetics of disjunctive connection as well as a sly, trenchant engagement with mid-20th Century history at the micro and macro-levels: "To compose words is to place them in the space-time of their textual becoming. Their order of bloom details where they've been." Composed in block-like stanzas these poems play at the edge of maxim and folk saying, at once confirming and ironizing the traditional power of such forms to provide comfort and wisdom. To write into such forms is to build a slender bulwark against erasure. "But the future we hoped for has disappeared." Not here, though. Signage on a forgotten road, maybe. But lovely and deep.

Author Biography

Ted Pearson grew up on the San Francisco Peninsula. After early musical training, he began writing poetry in 1964. He subsequently attended Vandercook College of Music, Foothill College, and San Francisco State University. In 1976, he published his first book, The Grit, and began his ongoing association with the San Francisco Language Poets. He has since published thirty books of poetry, most recently Overtures (BlazeVox, 2023), Chamber Music (Shearsman, 2024), and Early Autumn (Chax, 2025). He now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, with his wife, Sheila Lloyd, and their dog, Kofi.